Safe Was a Misconception
“I want to do it right now. I want to sleep with you, Oppa. Sleep with me.”
“Can’t you stop?”
“Why? You said you’d use protection. Wasn’t that you saying you’d do it with me? Now that we’re actually about to, you’re not interested? You don’t want to do it with me?”
“Hey, that’s—!”
Seo-won had been about to snap right back at Yuju’s sharp questions when the words died in his throat. Somehow her face looked like she was about to cry.
The man who had been answering so sharply fell silent and watched her carefully. The scene felt eerily familiar.
It was just like that night she had drunkenly shoved a marriage registration form at him, crying that if he didn’t sign it right then and there she would grab the first person she found and marry them instead.
Seo-won had no idea why Yuju was suddenly acting like this. He stared at her in confusion. Right now, she looked desperate.
“If you don’t trust me that much, I can just go do it with someone else, right?”
The moment Yuju played that card, Seo-won’s eyebrows shot up.
There would be men among her classmates. If she really set her mind to it, she could file a marriage registration with just about anyone—and the quality of that someone could be appalling.
That had been one of the reasons Seo-won had accepted her proposal in the first place. Whether it was him or not, Yuju was going to have to find some man eventually.
If she didn’t want that damn forced marriage.
So they had only formed an alliance to wait out a passing storm together. That was all it was supposed to be.
Yet from this moment, Seo-won felt the relationship that had once been nothing more than his friend’s little sister and her older brother’s friend begin to change.
“I… I have sexual desire too.”
Yuju felt Seo-won’s composure crack. Until now he had handled her like a child, turning her this way and that in the palm of his hand. This was the instant the balance of power flipped.
The man who had kept his cool no matter what sudden thing she did was now openly showing the emotion called “flustered.”
Catching that single fleeting feeling gave Yuju enormous courage.
“So you want me to hold it in for our entire marriage? Live as your legal wife in name and go meet other men?”
Affairs were poison to both of them—especially to two people who had chosen this marriage precisely to deceive everyone around them.
And besides…
“A safe older brother I already know is better than a dangerous one-night stand with some stranger, isn’t it?”
There was no way to deny that. Seo-won felt as if he had been struck across the back of the head.
More than anything, the lust that had already been rearing its head for a long time finally shattered the last of the reason he had been barely holding onto.
“Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”
“I won’t regret it.”
“…….”
“I think I’ll regret it more if we don’t.”
No matter what he said, her answers came back firm. Those answers set fire to the desire Seo-won had been suppressing.
“Ah—!”
He could no longer hold back. Seo-won closed the distance and kissed her roughly. After all that hesitation, the urgency of the act felt almost absurd.
Faced with a kind of desire he had never experienced in his life, his eyes had gone wild; the confusion had already flown far away. Only questions remained in its place.
She was the same as him. And yet somehow he had the illusion that her skin tasted sweet.
Even the soft breaths she exhaled between their lips just to breathe felt so sweet they made his tongue tingle.
He really had lost his mind. Seo-won shed the last shred of reason he possessed. No matter how sexually inexperienced he was, in a moment like this he was ruled by instinct.
“W-wait… just a second…”
Yuju, who had been so bold only moments before, seized the brief gap when their lips parted so she could breathe and cried out.
Seo-won’s demeanor had completely changed from earlier. Even after watching him for so long, she was discovering a side of her older brother’s friend she had never seen.
Fear arrived too late. It was already far past the point of no return. Seo-won’s eyes had lost focus.
“Ugh!”
His hand roughly pushed aside her damp clothes and invaded.
Clumsy Yuju and Seo-won were on entirely different levels.
Their lips met again, and every time her breath tangled with his, some strange sensation swirled outward from her navel.
The peculiar feeling spreading through her whole body made her strength drain away. At the same time, the tension only climbed higher.
His actions were undeniably impatient.
Yet he handled her with the careful gentleness of someone handling glass that would shatter at the slightest rough touch.
Even though he had lost his reason long ago, he still took her condition into account. The very fact that he was doing this with Yuju at all was proof that he was no longer in his right mind.
“Wrap your arms around my neck.”
The mouth that had been roughly exploring hers traveled down to her cheek. The low, hoarse whisper and the half-lidded eyes looking at her were devastatingly sensual.
So this is what he looks like when he comes undone.
He had always been strangely perfect. Anyone would have moments of falling apart, yet even when she watched carefully she had never witnessed such a side of him—which made it all the more fascinating.
Whatever confusion Yuju had felt about what she herself had started flew far away. She sank so deep into Seo-won that every other sense dulled.
It felt like she was under a spell. As if hypnotized, she did exactly as he told her. She followed him into the tingling, dizzying world he led her into.
In the midst of acts that were both tender and rough, Yuju slowly drowned in a strange new sensation.
Seo-won was the same. The moment he pressed bare skin tightly against hers and lifted her clean off the floor—
“I…”
A wet breath cut through the air that had been filled with nothing but messy sounds. It was Yuju who had been swaying beneath him however he pushed her; she was the one who opened her mouth.
Her eyes, which had been writhing between pain and pleasure, were brimming with tears.
It should have been a pitiful sight. And yet somehow Yuju looked resolute. The woman he had always thought fragile looked strong for the first time.
“I’m never divorcing you, Oppa.”
At the sudden declaration Seo-won looked quietly down at her. Her determined eyes held so many meanings that confusion surged over him like a wave.
He still had no idea why she had suddenly thrown herself at him, or why she was saying something like this.
But one thing became certain.
“Alright. I won’t divorce you either.”
There was not a single trace of falsehood in his tone. A smile rose on Yuju’s face, which had been full of fear even as she spoke so boldly.
After reducing a person to this state… Seo-won stared blankly for a moment at Yuju smiling so harmlessly. He sank into that strange feeling for only a second before he gripped her chin.
There was no time for leisure. He intended to hold her accountable for setting fire to the desire he had barely been restraining.
Seo-won kissed her first again. He buried himself deeper into the woman who naturally wound her arms around his neck.
Through the places where their bodies met, they shared each other’s heat with perfect clarity.
It was the beginning of a very hot, very long night.
Yuju frowned at the mercilessly blaring alarm. She groped through the air until she found her phone.
She finally managed to shut it off, but there was no going back to sleep. Her whole body ached as if she had been thoroughly beaten, and a groan escaped her on its own.
Calling him a safe older brother was a massive misconception.
That was Yuju’s honest assessment of Seo-won after their first night together.
She had believed he was someone without emotional ups and downs. Only now, after getting close enough to actually get involved with him, had she discovered new sides of him.
Always conscious of the public eye, always living correctly like someone in a high position… and yet he also had these strangely off-kilter moments she would have sworn didn’t suit him at all.
But in bed, he was on a level that words like that simply could not describe.
Choi Seo-won, enslaved by desire, was a terrifying man. She wanted to scold her past self for going around calling someone like that “safe.”
Softly…
Yuju pulled the blanket all the way up to her neck, covering a body that wasn’t wearing a single thread. Every muscle in her body screamed for a brief moment, but there was something that bothered her more than the physical pain.